What’s it about?
A couple of robots escape from a space battle with sensitive data that could help a scrappy band of rebels destroy a giant weapon called the Death Star. The robots crash land on a desert planet, where they hook up with a young moisture farmer (who dreams of space heroics) and a grizzled old hermit played by Alec Guinness (who hopes to teach the youngster an old martial arts philosophy called “the Force”).
A young Harrison Ford and an alien who looks like Bigfoot agree to transport the fugitives and the secret plans to the rebel base. But first they must rescue one of the rebellion’s leaders (a feisty princess) from deep inside the Death Star (a moon-sized space station that destroys entire planets) and have a quick electric sword fight with top bad guy Darth Vader (a black-helmeted mystic voiced by James Earl Jones). After all that’s done, the rebellion uses the captured plans to launch a last-ditch attack against the Death Star before their secret headquarters is blasted into oblivion.
Is it any good?
I said at the very beginning of this project that I was going to focus on less well-known movies instead of the ones that everybody knows about. That’s still true -- I’m still watching at least one movie that I haven’t seen yet for each year and still doing my best to dig a little deeper to find them. But I have known for a long time now that I was going to write something about STAR WARS. Even if I had nothing to say myself, it would at least give other people a chance to say whatever they wanted. Because, as you all know, everybody has an opinion on STAR WARS.
The version that I just finished watching is the DVD of the original theatrical version (as opposed to the special edition with additional footage that came out in 1997). I picked this version on purpose -- not because I think it’s “better”, but because it’s practically impossible for me to watch the special edition without playing a (very distracting) game of “spot the new footage”.
Like most folks my age, I watched STAR WARS a lot as a kid. It was on television every few months, and at some point my folks taped one of those broadcasts so that we could watch it whenever we wanted on long summer days. (We had no Nintendo in my house, incidentally.) I was in high school when the special edition version was released to theaters, and my friends and I naturally all went, since none of us had ever had the chance to see it on the big screen. And then, after that -- nothing. Except for a snippet here and there on television, I didn’t watch STAR WARS again for ten years. I did see a couple of the prequel movies (one in a second-run theater and one on DVD), but after 1997 I left the original trilogy alone for a decade.
The ten-year gap was at least partly on purpose. After watching something so many times during such formative years, I felt like STAR WARS was no longer just a movie to me. It’s a rare experience that I can remember having at many different points in my life. Watching STAR WARS had become like an archaeological expedition -- I could use the movie as a prism to look back into my past and remember how I felt at different stages of growing up. And for some reason, I wanted to put a rest to that. Without being too melodramatic about it, I suppose I packed up STAR WARS with the rest of my childhood and started looking for new experiences instead.
Until, that is, one fateful night in a hotel room in Ventura, California. Flipping around the cable stations, I came across the very beginning of STAR WARS on HBO. It was totally unplanned, but it had been ten years since I had last seen it and I decided right then that enough time had passed. I could watch it again with an uncritical eye and judge its merits as a mere movie. The result? I didn’t much like it.
I liked parts of it, of course. I couldn’t deny that the assault on the Death Star was an amazing fifteen minutes of cinema, and some of the screwball chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher was fun. But by and large, I was not impressed by the simple plot, flat characters, and borderline nonsensical events. I could see why Alec Guinness had asked George Lucas to kill him off. Yet, watching it again now, I can’t help but think I completely missed the point in that hotel room.
Of course, things are different now. For the past nine months, I have almost literally watched nothing else besides science fiction movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A couple entries ago, I said that I had this secret hypothesis that science fiction could be divided into pre-STAR WARS and post-STAR WARS. I don’t really think that’s true anymore, but it is certainly true that there is nothing else prior to 1977 that looks or even feels even remotely like STAR WARS. George Lucas didn’t invent the space opera, but he made it look absolutely incredible.
One of the most interesting things about STAR WARS (in the context of the popular sci-fi flicks that came before it) is that it isn’t designed to make you think. It has no specific message or cautionary tale to deliver. George Lucas famously cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth when he was working on the movie, but any “meaning” in the movie is vague and mushy. This is a big departure from movies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where all the spectacle and circumstance seem crafted specifically to make you ponder the nature of humanity (or something equally heavy).
STAR WARS is entirely an adventure -- and it’s an adventure in a startling universe. The Mos Eisley cantina scene alone contains more surprising aliens than the rest of sci-fi cinema had managed to conjure up in the previous eighty years. The same holds true for the other details of the sci-fi world -- the giant skeleton of some extinct creature in the Tatooine desert, the glimpses of banthas being ridden by sand people, the brief allusions to the Galactic Senate by the Imperial brass, the battered and dirty ships of the rebellion, and so on.
STAR WARS is a movie that is just full of stuff -- much of it half-realized or barely mentioned. Even the concepts of Jedi knights and the Force itself are undeveloped here. I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Much of what I loved about STAR WARS as a kid were these tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond. It was a few years before I saw any of the sequels, and I know that I wanted to know more about everything in the world. (Most of all, I wanted to see more banthas.) In some ways, the sequels and the special editions ruin some of this feeling of wonder and excitement.
On the other hand, as I was watching this time, I was surprised how much my knowledge of the rest of the series gave more meaning to certain events. I found it very hard to identify anything redeeming about THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES when I saw them (never saw REVENGE OF THE SITH), but I was aware this time that knowing what Obi Wan Kenobi was like back in his prime made his appearance here as an old man all that more meaningful. And his acquiescence to death at the hands of Darth Vader was something that never ever made any sense to me as a kid or teenager. It’s only in knowing what Obi Wan knows about the relationship between himself and Darth Vader, and between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, that it actually makes sense.
So STAR WARS is pretty well ruined for me as a movie, from a combination of individual factors, cultural factors, and George Lucas specific factors. From my point of view, we’ve all collaborated to turn a perfectly decent movie into... what exactly? Something more than a movie, I suppose, and something seemingly completely unique. Maybe generations from now or in countries somehow untouched by American culture, folks will think of STAR WARS as just another movie. But for me at least, I don’t think that kind of assessment is possible at all.
What else happened this year?
More entries to come! Stick around and find out!
Showing posts with label Peter Cushing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Cushing. Show all posts
Monday, October 19, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: HORROR EXPRESS
What’s it about?
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Monday, May 18, 2009
1967: FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN
What’s it about?
Presumably tired of animating monsters, Dr Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) and his two assistants instead work on experiments intended to preserve life after death. Frankenstein’s plan to achieve this consists of trapping a departing soul as it takes flight after death, repairing or replacing any bodily damage, and returning the soul to bring the patient back to life. But while celebrating the partial success of one experiment in the local village, Frankenstein’s younger assistant gets into a brawl with three insolent dandies. Later, the dandies accidentally kill a man, and the assistant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.
Frankenstein sets his sights on using the boy for his first true attempt at bringing a corpse back to life. And when the boy’s sweetheart (a barmaid with some physical disabilities) drowns herself in grief after the execution, Frankenstein decides to transfer the boy’s soul to her body instead of repairing the mess the guillotine made. But the success of the experiment only results in complications as the revived girl seems to have two personalities -- and not necessarily nice ones.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen as many Frankenstein movies as I probably should have, but the usual formula seems to consist of the doctor using spare body parts to construct a monster that then goes on to terrorize people and/or be terrorized by people until it is destroyed. Variations in the story are for the most part confined to adjustments in Frankenstein’s motivations (anywhere from “scientifically obsessed” to “demonically possessed”) and similar adjustments in the monster’s personality (“misunderstood and persecuted” to “homicidally evil”). But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN throws out about 95% of this formula, and I think it’s all the better for it.
Not only is the story in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN less familiar than that in the usual Frankenstein movie, but I think it may actually be a better one. The big elephant in the room with Frankenstein has always been why anybody should go to all that trouble just to make a human being. After all, there already exists a pretty reliable method for making new humans -- and it doesn’t require grave robbery, hacksaws, electric shocks, or hunchbacks. So at some level it’s usually necessary to take Frankenstein as an allegory or a psychological case study -- why he wants to build monsters is ultimately less important than what happens when he tries. But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN doesn’t really need any of this hand-waving since the doctor’s goal -- restoring the recently deceased to life -- is one that has obvious medical benefits.
In fact, the Frankenstein that Peter Cushing plays here hardly even seems to be the same character who shows up in other movies. There is no mention of any monsters at all, neither in his past nor his future. Some of the villagers do suspect that the doctor may be a witch, but the law treats him as a perfectly law abiding citizen -- more eccentric than dangerous or frightening. Probably the best scene with Frankenstein is one where he appears as a character witness at his assistant’s trial. He seems genuinely concerned and gives a sympathetic testimony, but always remains intellectual and detached. When asked whether it would be “impossible” for the boy to have committed the crime, instead of insisting on his belief in the boy’s innocence, Frankenstein pauses and then says he can’t definitely rule out the possibility. There’s no suggestion that this piece of testimony is what sends the boy to the guillotine, but it’s certainly the kind of precise answer that scientific mind would give and that the villagers might misconstrue.
I wrote last week in my entry about THE FACE OF ANOTHER that I am starting to think it’s often better when movies simply hint at deeper themes instead of completely exploring them. It was while watching FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN that this idea hit me most clearly. There is, after all, a potentially rich and bizarre occurrence at the heart of this movie: a boy dies and is then brought back to life in the body of his girlfriend. Besides the gender switch, one would also expect a certain amount of distress to come from inhabiting the body of your old flame. Those questions are all natural enough, given the premise of the movie, but they remain for the most part completely unaddressed. Yet, I decided that I was okay with that. For once, I was watching an interesting Frankenstein movie with a fairly unique story, and mostly I just wanted to find out how it was going to end. It also didn’t seem likely that this particular movie could have really gone anywhere really satisfying with those deep, difficult questions. There’s something to be said for not biting off more than you can chew.
In any event, the way the story does end isn’t exactly a revelation. The revived girl doesn’t remember much of her past life, and mostly just wants to know who she is and where she came from. The boy’s soul seems to be mingled in with her own, and he only really asserts himself to exact murderous revenge on the dandies who got him killed. This is as close as the movie ever gets to a monster, and interestingly enough it means at the end that Frankenstein comes off looking pretty good. He never has to pay for his crimes against nature, and frankly it’s not clear that he actually committed any. In the usual Frankenstein story, it’s the doctor himself who gets blamed for the behavior of the monster since it is his creation. In this case, however, the murderous “monster” is really the soul of another human being which Frankenstein merely transferred to a new body, so there’s not much of a feeling that the doctor could be directly responsible for what follows. The ending is a bit run-of-the-mill, but all in all this is a refreshingly unusual take on a story that is often just way too familiar.
What else happened this year?
-- Professor Quatermass makes a horrific discovery in the London Underground that casts new light on the course of human evolution in the last of Hammer's original Quatermass trilogy, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
-- And the Czechs put together one of the best sci-fi movies from anywhere in the Soviet bloc with THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE. It follows a group of young, wild women wandering a post-apocalyptic world where there are practically no male survivors.
-- George Lucas filmed his student short ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX-1138 4EB, which would be the basis for his first feature film in 1971.
-- Don Knotts and Leslie Nielsen starred in THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT, which I only just realized moments ago is available online or I would have definitely watched it already.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1967...
Go for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT if you can find it, or THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE if you can't.
Presumably tired of animating monsters, Dr Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) and his two assistants instead work on experiments intended to preserve life after death. Frankenstein’s plan to achieve this consists of trapping a departing soul as it takes flight after death, repairing or replacing any bodily damage, and returning the soul to bring the patient back to life. But while celebrating the partial success of one experiment in the local village, Frankenstein’s younger assistant gets into a brawl with three insolent dandies. Later, the dandies accidentally kill a man, and the assistant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.
Frankenstein sets his sights on using the boy for his first true attempt at bringing a corpse back to life. And when the boy’s sweetheart (a barmaid with some physical disabilities) drowns herself in grief after the execution, Frankenstein decides to transfer the boy’s soul to her body instead of repairing the mess the guillotine made. But the success of the experiment only results in complications as the revived girl seems to have two personalities -- and not necessarily nice ones.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen as many Frankenstein movies as I probably should have, but the usual formula seems to consist of the doctor using spare body parts to construct a monster that then goes on to terrorize people and/or be terrorized by people until it is destroyed. Variations in the story are for the most part confined to adjustments in Frankenstein’s motivations (anywhere from “scientifically obsessed” to “demonically possessed”) and similar adjustments in the monster’s personality (“misunderstood and persecuted” to “homicidally evil”). But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN throws out about 95% of this formula, and I think it’s all the better for it.
Not only is the story in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN less familiar than that in the usual Frankenstein movie, but I think it may actually be a better one. The big elephant in the room with Frankenstein has always been why anybody should go to all that trouble just to make a human being. After all, there already exists a pretty reliable method for making new humans -- and it doesn’t require grave robbery, hacksaws, electric shocks, or hunchbacks. So at some level it’s usually necessary to take Frankenstein as an allegory or a psychological case study -- why he wants to build monsters is ultimately less important than what happens when he tries. But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN doesn’t really need any of this hand-waving since the doctor’s goal -- restoring the recently deceased to life -- is one that has obvious medical benefits.
In fact, the Frankenstein that Peter Cushing plays here hardly even seems to be the same character who shows up in other movies. There is no mention of any monsters at all, neither in his past nor his future. Some of the villagers do suspect that the doctor may be a witch, but the law treats him as a perfectly law abiding citizen -- more eccentric than dangerous or frightening. Probably the best scene with Frankenstein is one where he appears as a character witness at his assistant’s trial. He seems genuinely concerned and gives a sympathetic testimony, but always remains intellectual and detached. When asked whether it would be “impossible” for the boy to have committed the crime, instead of insisting on his belief in the boy’s innocence, Frankenstein pauses and then says he can’t definitely rule out the possibility. There’s no suggestion that this piece of testimony is what sends the boy to the guillotine, but it’s certainly the kind of precise answer that scientific mind would give and that the villagers might misconstrue.
I wrote last week in my entry about THE FACE OF ANOTHER that I am starting to think it’s often better when movies simply hint at deeper themes instead of completely exploring them. It was while watching FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN that this idea hit me most clearly. There is, after all, a potentially rich and bizarre occurrence at the heart of this movie: a boy dies and is then brought back to life in the body of his girlfriend. Besides the gender switch, one would also expect a certain amount of distress to come from inhabiting the body of your old flame. Those questions are all natural enough, given the premise of the movie, but they remain for the most part completely unaddressed. Yet, I decided that I was okay with that. For once, I was watching an interesting Frankenstein movie with a fairly unique story, and mostly I just wanted to find out how it was going to end. It also didn’t seem likely that this particular movie could have really gone anywhere really satisfying with those deep, difficult questions. There’s something to be said for not biting off more than you can chew.
In any event, the way the story does end isn’t exactly a revelation. The revived girl doesn’t remember much of her past life, and mostly just wants to know who she is and where she came from. The boy’s soul seems to be mingled in with her own, and he only really asserts himself to exact murderous revenge on the dandies who got him killed. This is as close as the movie ever gets to a monster, and interestingly enough it means at the end that Frankenstein comes off looking pretty good. He never has to pay for his crimes against nature, and frankly it’s not clear that he actually committed any. In the usual Frankenstein story, it’s the doctor himself who gets blamed for the behavior of the monster since it is his creation. In this case, however, the murderous “monster” is really the soul of another human being which Frankenstein merely transferred to a new body, so there’s not much of a feeling that the doctor could be directly responsible for what follows. The ending is a bit run-of-the-mill, but all in all this is a refreshingly unusual take on a story that is often just way too familiar.
What else happened this year?
-- Professor Quatermass makes a horrific discovery in the London Underground that casts new light on the course of human evolution in the last of Hammer's original Quatermass trilogy, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
-- And the Czechs put together one of the best sci-fi movies from anywhere in the Soviet bloc with THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE. It follows a group of young, wild women wandering a post-apocalyptic world where there are practically no male survivors.
-- George Lucas filmed his student short ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX-1138 4EB, which would be the basis for his first feature film in 1971.
-- Don Knotts and Leslie Nielsen starred in THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT, which I only just realized moments ago is available online or I would have definitely watched it already.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1967...
Go for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT if you can find it, or THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE if you can't.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1957: THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN
What’s it about?
Botanist Peter Cushing disregards the objections of his wife and mysterious warnings from a local wise man to join an expedition scaling the Himalayas in search of the fabled Yeti. Tempers soon flare on the five-man expedition when it becomes clear that not everyone is there for the same reason. Nerves fray even further when one man is injured by the carelessness of another, and vital equipment is destroyed in an angry scuffle. By the time a Yeti appears (only to be promptly shot at by a trigger-happy trapper), the men in the party are already practically at each other’s throats.
Meanwhile, Peter Cushing’s wife becomes concerned when the expedition’s native guide returns to the base camp in a panic. Though the locals try to hide the truth, she insists on mounting her own rescue party to seek out her husband. But things go from bad to worse on the mountain as foul weather moves in and the Yeti begin literally playing mind games with the survivors of the first party.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Peter Cushing would eventually go on to play Victor Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, the vampire hunter Van Helsing, and many other roles in Hammer movies, but this is one of his first for the studio. I haven’t seen many of Peter Cushing’s other movies, but he is certainly one of the very best things about THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN. And in a movie where the focus is heavily on interpersonal interactions rather than scary monsters, appealing actors are pretty darn important.
It took me a while to identify the pattern, but there’s a coyness about Hammer’s sci-fi flicks that sits in stark contrast to most American movies of the period. Whereas American movies usually start developing right away whatever fantastic mystery or conflict they have for their centerpiece, Hammer flicks instead reserve the sci-fi elements until almost the last possible moment and spend most of their early running time on character interactions. (This is not necessarily true of every single Hammer movie -- but it’s true of many of them, and none more so than THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN.) Consequently, the Hammer movies often seem more naturalistic since we see many of the characters dealing with perfectly ordinary conflicts at home or in their jobs. “More naturalistic” doesn’t necessarily mean “better”, of course, since it’s perfectly possible to make a very boring movie about domestic discord and work stress. But it certainly gives the pictures a different mood than most of those from other studios, and often they come off feeling as though the scripts were written for a more adult audience. The fact that it’s a different approach makes it feel a bit like a breath of fresh air for that reason alone. But anybody who approaches this movie with the quite reasonable expectation that they will see a lot of exaciting abominable snowman action is going to be sorely disappointed.
In fact, I will admit that I find Hammer’s skewed focus frustrating at times -- breath of fresh air or not. The abominable snowmen do eventually show up, but they are kept entirely off-screen (except for a single hairy arm) until the final minutes of the movie. I’m not sure if that was done for budgetary reasons or if it’s the manifestation of some perverse British desire to deny the audience, but the refusal to show a clear shot of the title creature pretty quickly became both annoying and absurd. Fortunately, much of the picture would work just as well if there weren’t any Yeti at all, and the story is really quite good. Peter Cushing is a scientific man who comes to realize that the expedition he’s joined has commercial objectives that he strongly disagrees with. But by the time he learns the truth, the party is already high up among the peaks of the Himalayas, and there’s nothing he can do about it without endangering himself and the others. There are also some interesting theories put forth about who the Yeti are -- rather than evolutionary throwbacks, it’s suggested that they could be the inheritors of the Earth who are simply waiting for man to annihilate himself. So despite the disappointing dearth of actual live Yeti action, there are still quite a few things to recommend THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN -- but primarily to those already disposed to like Peter Cushing or Hammer movies.
Botanist Peter Cushing disregards the objections of his wife and mysterious warnings from a local wise man to join an expedition scaling the Himalayas in search of the fabled Yeti. Tempers soon flare on the five-man expedition when it becomes clear that not everyone is there for the same reason. Nerves fray even further when one man is injured by the carelessness of another, and vital equipment is destroyed in an angry scuffle. By the time a Yeti appears (only to be promptly shot at by a trigger-happy trapper), the men in the party are already practically at each other’s throats.
Meanwhile, Peter Cushing’s wife becomes concerned when the expedition’s native guide returns to the base camp in a panic. Though the locals try to hide the truth, she insists on mounting her own rescue party to seek out her husband. But things go from bad to worse on the mountain as foul weather moves in and the Yeti begin literally playing mind games with the survivors of the first party.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Peter Cushing would eventually go on to play Victor Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, the vampire hunter Van Helsing, and many other roles in Hammer movies, but this is one of his first for the studio. I haven’t seen many of Peter Cushing’s other movies, but he is certainly one of the very best things about THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN. And in a movie where the focus is heavily on interpersonal interactions rather than scary monsters, appealing actors are pretty darn important.
It took me a while to identify the pattern, but there’s a coyness about Hammer’s sci-fi flicks that sits in stark contrast to most American movies of the period. Whereas American movies usually start developing right away whatever fantastic mystery or conflict they have for their centerpiece, Hammer flicks instead reserve the sci-fi elements until almost the last possible moment and spend most of their early running time on character interactions. (This is not necessarily true of every single Hammer movie -- but it’s true of many of them, and none more so than THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN.) Consequently, the Hammer movies often seem more naturalistic since we see many of the characters dealing with perfectly ordinary conflicts at home or in their jobs. “More naturalistic” doesn’t necessarily mean “better”, of course, since it’s perfectly possible to make a very boring movie about domestic discord and work stress. But it certainly gives the pictures a different mood than most of those from other studios, and often they come off feeling as though the scripts were written for a more adult audience. The fact that it’s a different approach makes it feel a bit like a breath of fresh air for that reason alone. But anybody who approaches this movie with the quite reasonable expectation that they will see a lot of exaciting abominable snowman action is going to be sorely disappointed.
In fact, I will admit that I find Hammer’s skewed focus frustrating at times -- breath of fresh air or not. The abominable snowmen do eventually show up, but they are kept entirely off-screen (except for a single hairy arm) until the final minutes of the movie. I’m not sure if that was done for budgetary reasons or if it’s the manifestation of some perverse British desire to deny the audience, but the refusal to show a clear shot of the title creature pretty quickly became both annoying and absurd. Fortunately, much of the picture would work just as well if there weren’t any Yeti at all, and the story is really quite good. Peter Cushing is a scientific man who comes to realize that the expedition he’s joined has commercial objectives that he strongly disagrees with. But by the time he learns the truth, the party is already high up among the peaks of the Himalayas, and there’s nothing he can do about it without endangering himself and the others. There are also some interesting theories put forth about who the Yeti are -- rather than evolutionary throwbacks, it’s suggested that they could be the inheritors of the Earth who are simply waiting for man to annihilate himself. So despite the disappointing dearth of actual live Yeti action, there are still quite a few things to recommend THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN -- but primarily to those already disposed to like Peter Cushing or Hammer movies.
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